The queen was eighteen, though she looked like a child, or ageless. So pale and slender, her freckled face so distressed with fatigue, that it was hard to believe she wasn’t stricken with haemophilia. It was said that her grandmother Sophia was a dispossessed noble of the Motor Kingdom, and that Nadia herself was the Motor King’s cousin. The rumor was credible: every infirmity that Queen Nadia implied, that tyrant in his walking chair actually possessed. She nodded me to the stool at the clavier. Then she tucked a few limp hairs behind her ear and placed her lips to the speaking tube again.
“And should our kingdom be saved, the man responsible for its salvation will take his rightful place beside me as our king, and as my husband.”
Although I’d foreseen the end of her reign, it was hard not to hope for victory as a distant cheer echoed up from the lower halls. Reaching forward, she flicked off the electric power. For a few moments there was no sound in the room but her quiet sniffling and next door’s gurgling acid bath, cleaning the glass for plating.
She held out her hand and I took it, the long fingers bunching limply. I bent close to her and murmured, “No queen has ever kept that promise.”
“Aye, Daniel.” She nodded sadly. “The men know it, too.”
“Now is the time, Nadia. If ever.” The words sounded hollow as I said them. My divinations hadn’t shown me if we would live or die. They hadn’t shown me because it didn’t matter if we lived or died; it didn’t matter if we fled. To the Great Being it only mattered that the Motor King would take this palace. The soldiers would loot the treasury, throw the corpses over the side of the tract, and settle. Demand for mirrors would flow in without pause from all corners of the world, and someone would have to make them, wouldn’t they? And so this Motor conquest would, bit by bit, become the Mirror Kingdom again. That was what had happened in the first place when old Queen Sophia moved in. The duke then in residence was the Motor King’s vassal. She poisoned his wine on a mission of trade. Her first instruction to his people, now hers, was to go on with their work as if nothing had changed.
Far away, clanging and screams could be heard. Booming gunshots, stout walls resounding like bells. And beneath that, the ceaseless tapping on copper frames, the acid wash slurping, the grinding of glass. The peasants in their workshops knew nothing would change. Even the women felt no fear. They had more value at their benches than as spoils of war.
They stayed bent over their mirrors, in on the game, as Nadia and I changed into rough, faded cotton. I took the garnets out of my earlobes; Nadia tugged off her emerald ring. We balled up the jewelry in royal velvet and guardsman’s corduroy. I sprinted to my suite, the sounds of battle growing louder, the roar of the artillery almost constant—and threw this finery out the window, to rain wealth on a distant country.
When the enemy forced their way upstairs, uniforms filthy with blood and smoke, Nadia and I sat as factory-workers. With her red hair tied under a cap, she pushed pane after pane of glass through a grinding lathe. Several benches away, I loaded these panes into a tub of acid and sealed the lid.
The first man in was an officer. He was short, bald, and built like a boiler. Sweat glistened on his forehead and two parallel streaks of blood banded his thigh. He stood in the doorway, blocking the enlisted boys peering over his shoulder. He uncapped a metal tube and tapped a roll of paper into his hand. He cleared his throat and read.
“Attention! You are now the property of His Highness Stefan III, Lord of this gyrus and all dwelling therein, be they aware or as yet unaware of His dominion.”
The peasants knew their value. They expected something like this. For the oldest of them—those with gnarled, stained fingers, nearing the start of their pension years—it was something they’d heard before from Queen Sophia. And so despite the stench of battle and the faint sound of boots being dragged across the floor, the workers felt light enough to chuckle. Be they aware or as yet unaware. I smiled, too, though Nadia didn’t.
In a smooth motion the captain drew his dagger and swiped it cleanly over the nearest throat. A portly man with pebbly skin fell forward, burbling, spilling his life on a looking glass. As the room erupted in shouts the captain unblocked the door, admitting the soldiers with their rifles leveled. Quiet returned as he wiped the blade on his thigh, painting a third stripe alongside the other two.
He unrolled the paper again. “Insofar—” he wiped some crust from his eye— “insofar as you respect your new master and work faithfully, you will be permitted to live in peace and to carry out the functions for which you’ve been trained. Food and payment. . . .” He scanned down the page. “Well, the rest is all details.”
He rolled the paper and slipped it back in the tube. His blue eyes glittered—not from killing, I thought, but from the chase to come. “Now, who knows where the queen went?”
He leaned against the wall to watch our reactions. Peasants looked from one to another. Many things passed among them, but not loyalty. Nadia was crying. I raised my hand.
The officer spied me. “You, man.”
I stood up. “I can show you where the queen went, sir.”
I crossed the workshop to a door-sized mirror—door-sized because it was, in fact, a door. A damp draught billowed in. Behind the mirror: a dripping floor made of perforated iron grilles, a staircase twisting upward with repurposed piping for handrails. A few mirrors mounted randomly.
“Mm-hm.” Hands on his hips, the captain looked up into the winding dark, wiping rust-red drips off his forehead. He asked a few questions about where the stairway led. “Up,” was the best answer anyone could give. He shrugged, lit a cigarette, and went out, leaving a pair of his teenage soldiers at the hidden door.
~ ~ ~
In the dark hours, Nadia and I crept in our stockings from the dead man’s room, cut the two throats of those teenage soldiers, and quietly climbed the stairway.
~ ~ ~
In advance of this day I’d packed a bag. We had wineskins, dry fruit, and salted meat; daggers in our belts and a revolver snug in my vest. Sturdy shoes, jewels to barter, pouches of coins. Our ghostly faces stalked us pane by pane, until after hours of climbing we emerged into a high-ceilinged space both brightly lit and searingly hot.
The Motor Kingdom surrounded and interpenetrated the Mirror lands so thoroughly that regardless of which direction we went, it would be hard to predict whether we’d enter it. But this room, evidently, was friendly ground. It was a foundry, with giant cups pouring liquid glass onto troughs of molten metal. Grunting sweat-slick women and men, with firelight pouring off their muscles, directed the automation. They spared us a short glance as we emerged from the stairway. Choking on heat, we stumbled past and out onto a balcony encrusted with vines.
We’d not come far. The tract before the Mirror Palace was still the nearest below us, though from this vantage the soldiers appeared as fleas. They were camped all over the tract. The breeze gusting down the sulcus ruffled the canvas tarps on the war machines. A pinpoint fire flickered in the sparse drizzle. In a chalk circle a pair of the fleas tussled; a faint cheer reached us when one of them went sprawling.
I watched Nadia as she looked down. In a child-like face one expects to see childish feelings, the primary colors of sadness and hope. Nadia’s face contained neither of these. Tears dribbled down her cheeks, but the set of her lips and the embers in her eyes pointed to something other than sadness.
The mirrors in my own mind reflected nothing. Not knowing what else to do, I put an arm around her shoulder and muttered the obvious comforts. We’d find work soon, some way to live. We’d make our way through the Motor Kingdom and live anonymously. I might find a position doing cerebromancy, or we might find a home in the glass trade.
“Why bother, Daniel?”
“My queen?”
She looked at me, wet and red around her eyes’ blue rings. “Don’t call me a queen,” she said. “Or a lady. I’m nothing now, and so are you.”
“Nothing! My— You’re free. We’re free. Th
e mirrors predicted nothing beyond today. We can be anything, anyone. Anything we want.”
“I want death.”
“Nadia.”
“His, or mine.”
“But to what end? The Kingdom will survive this. So will the workers, men of yours still living.” I touched her shoulder. “They love you, my lady. They want you to live. As do I. And the only way we can ensure that is by leaving this country. Your time as a queen is done. Let the mirrors flow on without you.”
“‘Let the mirrors flow on!’” She flopped down on the vines, elbows on her knees. “Everything taken, but ‘never mind, my lady! Let the mirrors flow on!’” She looked up at me, weeping, and I recognized the other element in her face: rage. “Is this what it’s done to you, being a cerebromancer?”
“This is being a cerebromancer.” I sat beside her. “When you sat down so suddenly, the movement caused an infinitesimal trauma to the flesh in your head. In that chaos, a few of the creatures that compose your brain were killed. Are you sad for them? Or do you only care about them so long as they provide you with movement, emotions, the mirrors that reflect my mind in yours? And so, Nadia—”
“‘And so are we to the Great Being.’ I know, Daniel. I don’t care.” She planted a hand on my knee, leveraging. “I will have a throne again. May it cost the Great Being I-don’t-care-what, I will.”
Firelight enveloped her as she crossed the foundry floor. “I’d prefer not to do this alone, Daniel,” she called without looking back.
I gathered both packs and followed her.
~ ~ ~
Several miles above, we spent the night on a stairwell landing. A flickering light-coil erased and redrew our faces in the giant mirror comprising one wall. After a plug of tough, salty meat and a few figs, we spread our cloaks on the floor and bedded down for a sleepless night.
For a long time I lay on my back listening to her even breaths, letting the cold light dig into my eyes. I wondered what the creatures forming my own mind dreamed—if they had nightmares or good dreams, and indeed what there was in their world to dream of. I wondered too if the fall of the Mirror Palace was but a small contribution to the dream of our own Great Being—and what that being had to dream of.
“Daniel.”
Somehow, I’d fallen asleep after all. I blinked away images of a palsied white face under the Urchin Crown, of steel legs ticking like teeth on the floor. I listened for those legs and heard my own pumping heart and the light-coil’s faint popping noise.
“Daniel,” she said again.
She sat on the steps in her blouse and short pants, white arms folded across her knees. Her dagger lay on the steps next to her. I followed her gaze.
The light-coil sputtered. In the dark points of its cycle, the mirror showed nothing. But in the light, it reflected a vista far larger than our little room. The scene was a wedding, or perhaps a coronation, or both. We saw it from a balcony overlooking the procession. The spectators wore lavish costumes. They went mad with excitement, raining blue flowers on the parade of soldiers.
The royal couple, if that’s what they were, had already passed. The bride’s form and hair were hidden by an elaborate veil dragging behind her. The groom—it was easy to see who he was. He walked on four mechanical legs, ticking forward as coldly and precisely as those of a crab. An armature of clamps and cushions held his withered torso upright, bobbing limply as the jointed legs advanced. The Motor King’s crown was a cap of needles, each one sprouting a white filament too thick to be a hair. These were gathered into a braid down the length of his back.
The light-coil died, sealing us in darkness. When it fizzed back to life, the mirror showed only our little landing. Nadia stared at the glass, blinking as if she’d just woken and didn’t know yet where she was.
“It was me,” she whispered.
“I don’t think so, my queen.”
“I’m sure of it. The bride’s hand was my hand. You didn’t see?” She held up her left hand to show the little finger ending at the first knuckle. She’d lost it at the age of five in the clavier’s lid.
“The view was too distant to see that.” I shook my head. “Go to sleep, my lady. The bride in the mirror was not you. Or if it was, then how can we know what will change or hasten it? Maybe that girl will strangle him in the wedding bed; more likely she’ll be his chattel for a while, then fling herself off a balcony. Rejoice that it’s not you.” I lay down and shut my eyes.
“I’d rather die tomorrow, if marriage to that creature is the alternative.”
What could I say? She would probably get her wish. All day we’d batted plans back and forth. She wanted to return for survivors among her men. To seize a factory and call it a kingdom. I wanted to spend our jewels on a stake in a business, a comfortable life, a measure of freedom. We could call it a kingdom if she desired, so long as we got far away quickly. But close enough to strike back, she wanted to know, when we’re strong enough? And so we’d gone all day, spiraling upward on the narrow stairs.
Now I squeezed my eyes shut against the light trying to batter its way in. I tried to squeeze out the sound of her sniffling. I knew I should take her in my arms and comfort her. I had words prepared for these occasions, to whisper into her ears and soothe her mind to sleep.
She’d been six years old when I predicted the year of her overthrow. This was the myth she grew up with: because she touched so many lives as princess and then as queen, she mattered enough to appear in the signs read by cerebromancers, who see only the grand events.
In truth, I did what cerebromancers always do. Whether we see visions in mirrors or hear voices in warbling electrical static, we must always interpret, extrapolate, confabulate. Nadia’s downfall was only a guess. The vision that actually appeared showed only a merchant’s ledger, indicating that in this year the kingdom’s output of mirrors would decrease. It would stay depressed for some months, then return to normal.
What could cause this besides an invasion? Now I knew. In the vast sweep of human endeavor, in the absorption of a small kingdom into a greater one, the nexus of true significance was the death of the old glass polisher, made an example by the Motor King’s officer.
~ ~ ~
Every vision seen in a mirror has two meanings; neglect either one at your peril. The first is the image actually seen, and the second—perhaps more important—is how it affects the viewer. I should have divined the second meaning and offered Nadia the comfort she wanted. In the morning, I was alone. Her pack was gone. So were her cloak, her knife, my pistol, and half of our money.
Panic seized me. I shouted her name and banged open doors, surprising workers asleep in hard bunks and startling merchants blinking through spectacles at contracts. I bounded upstairs, stopping only when my thighs burned and my lungs wheezed. I stood on the landing, panting, until I heard voices growing louder above me. I hid in a privy—a zinc-lined booth that smelled like its function—as bootsteps echoed over the platform.
As they crossed the landing to file out through a narrow door, I considered my appearance: nothing identified me as a man of the Mirror lands. Except for my cloak I was dressed like a peasant. Assuming I wasn’t arrested for vagrancy, I could range throughout the Motor Kingdom at will. If I was lucky enough to find them, I could even seek help from the Inhibition: the secretive network of saboteurs and subversives active throughout the world. It was said they concentrated their work in the Motor Kingdom.
I stepped out of the privy to nod at the passing soldiers. They ignored me.
Two options were clear. Either Nadia had gone up, into the Motor heartland to spend her life on revenge—or down, to round up survivors and begin afresh. In neither case would she get her money’s worth. The Motor King was the best-guarded man in the world, and she was hardly a skilled assassin. She’d never killed except in the usual way of royalty, by ordering faithful men to their deaths. Just the same, any survivors she found below would be deserters. They’d never put a crown on her head, but they might at least k
eep her safe.
So I went upstairs, hoping she hadn’t gone this way and knowing angrily that she probably had. I was tired of her ambitions. But duty, years of promises made and kept, compelled me to find her and persuade her against revenge. As I climbed the stairs from landing to landing, I examined every mirror for a glimpse of red hair, a sallow cheekbone, a blue eye. But I saw only myself.
In a foul, low-ceilinged room where pungent chemicals ate the silver off old mirror shards—the metal flakes were caught in sieves and sold by the gram—I paid the old man in residence a brass penny to let me harvest food from his balcony. Between the cliffs fell sheets of warm rain, hazing the yellow light. The water drooled off a distant overhang, splashing onto the fragrant leaves.
Squatting to watch the rain fall, I peeled and ate a fist-sized melon. The rind sailed down, to be scraped off a tract, brushed off a shoulder, washed through a gutter down to the basal lands. There, the books said, copper-skinned farmers grew food of all kinds under sunlamps powered by falling water. It was there, one day, that my own body would fall after being heaved over the tract. I shook the water out of my hair As I stood in the doorway searching my pouch for another coin that might loosen the old man’s tongue if he knew of the Inhibition, an officer of the Motor King stepped into the room.
He was young with blushing cheeks and a thatch of black hair squirming to be free of his lieutenant’s cap. The old man sat in a rusting chair, a cloth breathing mask over his mouth, and the officer knelt to speak with him. I clipped the pouch shut and strode quickly by him, heart pounding against the dagger nestled under my arm. I nodded good day. He raised his cap, grinning a stupid, good-natured smile, and moved out of my way. My mouth was too dry to thank him.
In the mirrors outside, my face was white. Haggard pouches huddled under my eyes. Looking like a war refugee was likely to get me arrested, so I composed my face until I resembled a happy, footloose vagrant—the kind of man who was just passing through because passing through was how he preferred to live.
Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Page 24